American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists. Ohrid 2008

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Rhythmic Structure Constituents and Clitic Placement in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

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pp. 1-19

As in other inflected Slavic languages, the word order of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian (BCS) is relatively free. For instance, any three-word sentence composed of a noun subject, a noun object, and an active transitive verb, has six possible orders; and all six are grammatical (though with slightly different information-structure readings and stylistic effects). When it comes to clitics, however, things are quite rigid. All the clitics in a sentence or clause must occur together in...

On Quantity Dissimilation in East Slavic

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pp. 21-38

In many East Slavic dialects, the vowel in the immediately pretonic position has special prosodic status. For example, in standard Russian moderate type of akan'e the reduced vowel in immediately pretonic position is longer than are reduced vowels elsewhere (Bondarko et al. 1966); in standard Belarusian, an [a] in immediately pretonic position is longer than it is in other unstressed positions (Padluzhny 1977: 104;...

Purging Greek in the Legend of Salonica: A Medieval Slavic Myth of Language

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pp. 39-57

A century and a half after its first publication (1856), the Legend of Salonica remains enigmatic and controversial.¹ The debate has centered on three issues: the date of its composition, its historicity, and the identity of its narrator. While these questions merit further discussion, they are not the focus of this article. Rather, my purpose is to offer a new interpretation of the central episode, in which a raven or, in one manuscript, a dove drops objects that enter the monk...

The New Ukrainian Standard Language of 1798: Tradition vs. Innovation

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pp. 59-74

The place of the old literary tradition in new standard Ukrainian has been recently addressed by Mechkovskaia (2004) in her study of spatial and chronological parameters of the social typology of Slavic languages. Closely following Tolstoi (1988: 7–26), who authored one of the most comprehensive typologies of the Slavic literary languages, Mechkovskaia (2004: 261) examined Ukrainian in terms of dialect homogeneity vs. diversity, as well as the chronology of extralinguistic events in the history of written Ukrainian. With regard to the last parameter, standard...

A Folk Classification of Polish Emotions: Evidence from a Corpus-Based Study

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pp. 75-93

The contrast between the use of verbs in Slavic vs. adjectives in English to express emotion has been discussed by Wierzbicka (1994, 1995), among others, and suggests that the two languages may conceptualize emotions differently. In this paper, I focus on emotion nouns, i.e., words like English anger, indignation, hate, love, fear, desire, compassion, envy, euphoria, dread, anxiety, and their Polish...

Between Grammar and Onomatopoeia: Sound-Symbolic Schemata in Czech

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pp. 95-109

The study of onomatopoeia has a long history (e.g., Jespersen 1933; Thorndike 1945; Jakobson 1962 and 1971; Jakobson and Waugh 1979), and typologies and theoretical models for sound symbolism continue in more recent years (e.g., Hinton et al. 1994; Nuckolls 1996; Hamano 1998; F�nagy 2000; Herlofsky et al. 2005). The significant role played by sound in language processing has also...

The Status of Discourse Markers as Balkanisms in South Slavic

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pp. 111-129

The disintegration of Yugoslavia which has resulted in the breakup of the unified standard language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian into three separate languages (referred to variously as standard, official and/or literary languages), Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, and potentially a fourth, Montenegrin, does not make the work of the South Slavic dialectologist any easier.¹ “Doing dialectology” on South Slavic terrain has indeed become even more complicated by the...

Balkan Slavic Dialectology and Balkan Linguistics: Periphery as Center

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pp. 131-148

Much of the effort in Balkan linguistics has been dedicated to discovering the unity in Balkan diversity. The former Serbo-Croatian (henceforth BCS) has generally been seen as marginal to the Balkan linguistic enterprise, while Bulgarian and Macedonian have been viewed as central to it, and indeed served as the classic example of the distinction between membership in a language family and in a linguistic league (Slavic and Balkan, respectively). Today, the southeastern dialects...

On Prefixed Nouns in Late Common Slavic

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pp. 149-160

Proto-Slavic inherited from the parent language a dozen or so uninflected monosyllabic words with mostly spatial meanings which may be categorized as P. Preceding verbs (V), they come down in Late Common Slavic as prefixes (preverbs); preceding nouns (N), they come down as prepositions. Phonetically, the association of P with the following word in the sentence was close: iz followed by...

Syntax Meets Discourse: Subordination in Slavic

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pp. 161-180

Fundamental to the study of discourse is the fact that any coherent text is not simply a linear series of utterances, but rather is hierarchically organized. It is structured on at least two levels, a macro or global level and a micro or local level. Macro-level units can be correspondingly hierarchically organized into larger, more global-level units, as seen in longer stretches of discourse. Information structure similarly operates on at least two levels, a global thematic level and a more local...

Semantic Motivations for Aspectual Clusters of Russian Verbs

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pp. 181-196

Lexical meaning and aspect do not function independently in Russian. The meanings of verbs motivate their aspectual behavior because different types of events and their relationship to time are conceptualized in different ways. This article demonstrates how the presence of specific components in the meanings of Russian verbs correlates with the formation of specific types of Perfectives. The aspectual derivation patterns of Russian verbs are transparently motivated...

On the Classification of Macedonian Proverbs in an Electronic Database

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pp. 197-210

As linguistic constructs, proverbs are characterized by rigidity of form and complicated structure. As phenomena of folklore, proverbs are oral in nature and are easily spread in a number of variants and adaptations in variety of languages and cultures. As metaphoric constructs, proverbs can also be found in literary texts and in the visual arts. Although proverbs traditionally have been collected, classified, and studied by folklorists and paremiologists, they have also been an...

The Grammar of Oral Narrative in the Povest vremennykh let

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pp. 211-226

The Povest´ vremennykh let is a text written in a regular and polished language. Yet much of the chronicle derives from oral tales told by the druzhina. These tales span a range of genres from ancient legends through tales of heroism or perfidy (hand-to-hand combat; taunting by the enemy; the druzhina’s counsel) to military reportage.¹ The paradoxical fact that the content of the Povest´ vremennykh let is oral but its form, written, raises questions about the mechanism whereby...

A Typology of Slavic Menology Traditions

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pp. 227-244

There has long been a need for a taxonomy of medieval Slavic menologies, or year-length calendars of saints, because of the enormous substantive diversity from manuscript to manuscript in their saints’ listings for most calendar dates. The reason for the lack of consistency is that the medieval Eastern Orthodox Church had no beatification or canonization procedure, so that veneration of particular individuals as saints, and the assignment of specific calendar dates to these saints, varied widely according to century, country, and local tradition. Moreover, some manuscripts...

Convergent and Divergent Innovation in the Belarusian Dialects of the Bialystok and Hrodna Regions: A Sociolinguistic Border Impact Study

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pp. 245-264

The far-reaching socio-political and economic transformations that have occurred throughout Eastern Europe over the course of the last half-century have had a profound effect on the region’s linguistic landscape. The processes of industrialization and urbanization, often accompanied by ideologically inspired government policies designed to hasten the demise of traditional peasant society, have led in many areas to the rapid displacement of traditional rural dialects and...

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